Prime Day UK 2022 – highlights from the 2 day annual shopping festival!

Prime Day launched in 2015 as a celebration of the 20th anniversary of Amazon’s founding & has quickly become the biggest shopping event of the year for Amazon. Prime Day is a great opportunity for customers to snag fantastic deals on products they might not otherwise consider buying. Last year, Amazon Prime Day was a tremendous success, with Prime members spending billions of dollars on discounted items. In 2022 alone, global sales during the event reached a new record high of $12 Bn.

18 countries participated in Prime Day this year, including the US. We did a deep dive into what happened in the UK – the discounts Amazon offered and categories with the highest discounts as well as checked to see if other retailers tweaked their pricing strategy to compete with Amazon on Prime Day.

Methodology

• In addition to Amazon UK, we tracked some key retailers on 12 & 13th July 2022, on Prime Day.
  Retailers tracked – eBay UK, OnBuy, Selfridges, ASOS.com, Net-A-Porter 
• Categories tracked – Electronics, Wine & Spirits, Grocery, Furniture, Fashion, Beauty. 
• We looked at Additional Discounts offered on Prime Day: Additional Discount is the extra discount on an item during Prime Day when compared to the Pre-Prime day price. 
• We also looked at Post Prime Day Discounts, which were the discounts offered after the 2-day event ended.

Did other retailers compete with Amazon on Prime Day?

Traditionally, as Amazon’s Prime Day sale approaches, other retailers adjust their prices by offering summer deals or getting creative with offers. However, we did not see aggressive strategies from other retailers this year. In the US, Walmart always has a sale during Amazon’s Prime Day. The Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart announced there wouldn’t be an annual promotional event on Prime Day 2022 this year.

Another report published by Forrester stated that major retailers scaled back their promotions, and overall offers from other retailers were less than impressive. We took a look at the data we gathered in the UK to see if this trend aligned. 

• Our data showed that most retailers we tracked offered negligible discounts (in the range of 0.1 – 1.5%) and did not really try and compete or match the discounts Amazon was offering. 
• However, ASOS was the one retailer that competed heavily with Amazon in the Fashion & Beauty category. While Amazon offered an average additional discount of 7.7% in the Fashion category, ASOS offered 13.2%. And in the beauty category, Amazon offered 6.7%, while ASOS offered 15.2%.
• When we looked at post-prime day discounts, we saw that as soon as Prime Day ended, ASOS went back to the original price and stopped offering a discount which clearly shows they were keeping an active eye on out their competitors pricing. In fact, ASOS was offering up to 80% off almost everything on the site until Prime Day.

Which were the popular categories that offered the most discounts?

During Prime Day, shoppers saw tons of deals on essential gadgets. Tech deals were a massive hit and saw big discounts on everything from TVs, laptops, smartwatches, phones, and tablets. We look at the data we collected to see if we saw a similar trend. 

• Amazon offered discounts across categories and reported that some of the best-selling categories were Consumer Electronics & Home. 
• Our data too showed that the highest additional discounts were offered in electronics – Bluetooth Earphones at 18.4%, followed by Smartwatches at 14.9% and Laptops as well as Cameras, both at 12%.
• Low discounts were offered on Alcohol, with Beer at 0.9% and Wine at 1.3%, respectively.
• Relatively attractive discounts were seen in the Fashion & Beauty category – Sunglasses (9.1%), Shampoo (9.7%), & Watches (9.4%)

Electronics being the hot favorite – we wanted to deep dive into the data and get more insights on Amazon’s pricing & discounting strategy here. Discounts can entice customers to buy more, encourage customer loyalty, or clear out old inventory. However, businesses must be careful since too much discounting can eat into profits. They also have to be mindful of which products should be discounted and by how much. 

• Our data showed that the highest discounts (between 13 – 18%) were given on electronics priced between the £ 20-100 price range.
• Electronics priced higher, between the £ 100 – 500 pound price range, were discounted less than 10%
• However, high-value premium electronics over £ 500 were discounted slightly above 10%

How did Amazon manage stock availability during Prime Day?

Keeping track of inventory is especially important during big sales like Prime Day when thousands of customers are actively looking for deals.  There’s nothing worse than them finding the item they wanted is out of stock (OOS). OOS leads to lost sales, a situation that must be avoided at all costs. Read about how a small short term stock out on Amazon led to long term negative impacts for one of our customers. And let’s also look at the data and see what product availability looked like on Prime Day.

• Overall, Amazon maintained robust availability across categories, and re-stocking was constant both before, during & after the event. 
• Furniture, Fashion & Electronics had the highest availability. No surprise there since Amazon estimated that Home/ Furniture would be one of the best-selling categories.
• Grocery saw average availability – perhaps cause some of these products are perishables, so it’s best to be mindful about overstocking.

Which Brands Won on Prime Day?

If there is one thing to remember about improving your product visibility on Amazon, it’s that it all boils down to the usage of the right keywords. Using relevant keywords makes your product appear higher up in search when customers are running searches on Amazon for those products. And the higher up a product appears in search, the higher the chances of a sale! 

Let’s take a look at some popular categories and which brands had the highest Share of Search (SoS) during Prime Day.

• Corona, San Miguel, and Becks were the top 3 brands optimized for the keyword Beer. However, what’s really important to note is both Corona & Becks had 20% SoS that was completely organic. San Miguel had a 20% SoS too, but it was sponsored ads that gave them this artificial boost. 
• While a whole bunch of other brands had a 10% SoS most of them achieved this via Sponsored Ads. Youngever was the only brand that achieved this completely organically. They must have made sure they optimized key KPIs like content, ratings & reviews & product availability to achieve this result.

• There were deep discounts on a wide range of Lenovo laptops. For example, the Lenovo IdeaPad duet Chromebook and Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3 Chromebook were available at £100 off. Our data, too saw Lenovo & Asus fight for the top spot.
• Asus sponsored 28% of products before Prime Day, hoping to capitalize on the pre-sale frenzy. During the event, they sponsored only 13% of products, bringing down their total SoS from 31% before the event to 13% during the event. 
• Lenovo followed the opposite strategy; they sponsored just 6% of products before the event and during the event sponsored a whopping 25% which made them “almost” dominate the Laptop category during Prime Day.
• Then there was Microsoft, with the highest SoS at 38%, of which all of it was organic!

• The Smartphone SoS battle was clearly between Samsung & Xiaomi. Samsung was a consistent #1 at all 3 time periods (Before, During & After Prime Day) with the highest total SoS. Xiaomi came in at a close second. 
• Samsung had an exciting strategy – they went heavy on sponsorships before and after the event. Their sponsored SoS was 31% & 39% respectively. And SoS of 13% during the event. 
• Xiaomi’s strategy was just the opposite. Their sponsored SoS was 16% before the event. And 17% after the event, which was moderate compared to their Sponsored SoS during the event at 25%, which was much higher than Samsung’s 13%
• Critical to note, Xiaomi’s organic search visibility before, during, and after the event was 0%. It definitely should be a concern area for any brand.

• Both before & after the event, Cadbury had the highest visibility for the keyword Chocolate. During the event, they were not in the top 5 brands.
• During Prime Day, Nestle won the top spot and had a 29% SoS. However, before the event, they were at #3 and after at #2. Artificially boosting visibility might’ve had something to do with this.

Conclusion

Prime Day sales reached an estimated 12 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, 9.8% higher than last year, making it the most successful shopping event in Amazon’s history. If you’re a brand selling on Amazon or a retailer trying to compete with Amazon, reach out to us at DataWeave to know how we can help!

- Priyanka Meka
Priyanka is a Senior Business Analyst at Dataweave, 4th Aug, 2022

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